The Gathering Review

• 17th Mar 2011

Let’s get this out of the way first: The Gathering isn’t a very good film. Not very well scripted; not very well directed; not even particularly well-acted, it’s no surprise that you probably haven’t heard of it; neither had I. If, like me though, you don’t hold little things like not being very good against a film, then you might find this 2002 supernatural horror an enjoyable 90 minutes nonetheless.

The plot: Christina Ricci stars as a mysterious young girl who enters the lives of the Kirkman family after being hit by mother Kerry Fox’s car and suffering amnesia. As a result she stays with the family in their rural English manor home. After experiencing creepy night-time visions, Ricci begins to suspect something is going on in the village and that Stephen, the family’s young son, could be in danger. Aided by a brooding local man (Ioan Gruffudd), she attempts to get to the bottom of things and uncovers a dark secret behind her new home, which parallels the discovery of a mysterious underground chapel and the work of the Kirman family’s art historian patriarch (Stephen Dillane).

As I’ve said, the flaws in this film are many. The plot is full of gaping holes and the execution suffers serious pacing problems. The acting is sometimes dodgy, particularly in the case of Ricci and Gruffudd, who seem to have snoozed through their parts and share the opposite of chemistry onscreen, which is not helped by some pretty clunky dialogue. It all screams straight-to-DVD, which is, in a way, The Gathering’s saviour. Sit down to it expecting something mind-blowingly brilliant and original and you’ll be sorely disappointed, but approached as a guilty pleasure, it’s as good a way to kill an hour and a half as any, with enough going on in the plot and a handful of genuine scares to make for moderate entertainment.

The Gathering manages to squeeze a good few horror clichés into its slender runtime, something that, in any other genre, would be a serious problem. Horror though, especially of the unpretentious, b-movie type to which The Gathering belongs, thrives on the heavy-handed appropriation of tropes such as the creepy child, the menacing village locals and the old lady who knows stuff. It’s the sort of film where playing spot-the-cliché is half the fun.

For all its flaws, The Gathering, has enough about it to keep you interested and manages to build to a climax that’s something approaching exciting, in spite of a fairly predictable Shyamalan-esque plot twist. To damn it with faint praise, The Gathering is a pretty good, bad film.

Adam Richardson